Around the world, electrical utilities, oil and gas facilities, and water companies have been deploying automation to lower costs and improve the reliability of their services. Increased automation results in increased connectivity, leading to more opportunities for bad actors to disrupt services. The typical response is to deploy better IT solutions, such as firewalls and intrusion detection with analytics, as well as other tools that are able to address known threats but are impotent against previously unknown attacks. Those IT solutions are necessary, but not sufficient to secure critical systems. ViaSat has recently delivered a solution to Southern California Edison, the third largest utility in the U.S., to secure their distribution automation system. By using a combination of approaches such as defense in depth, quality of trust, identity management, physical sensors, and equipment bills of health, we are making it more difficult to penetrate Southern California Edison’s real-time control system. The implementation consists of a large-scale sensor grid that enables visualization of communications anomalies resulting from equipment faults, latent malware, and insider attacks, and provides mechanisms for preventing and containing attacks. This talk will introduce the fundamentals of ViaSat’s approach to securing critical infrastructure real-time control systems.

BIOGRAPHY:

Jerry Goodwin has B.A. degrees in math and physics from Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering with emphasis in Communications from the University of Southern California. He has 30 years of experience in developing satellite communications, networking, and security systems for commercial and defense applications. For the last two decades, he has worked at ViaSat in a large variety of roles, including software development, systems engineering, program management, business development, and general management. He previously led the Government Satcom business, the Government Systems Division Business Development, Sales, and Marketing team, and the Commercial International Sales team. He is currently the Vice President and General Manager of Secure Network Systems at ViaSat.

ViaSat develops secure network solutions for diverse clients, ranging from a variety of U.S. and international commercial customers (such as Southern California Edison and Australia’s NBNCo) to all branches of the U.S. military and intelligence community. ViaSat’s portfolio includes security solutions for real-time control systems, critical infrastructure, 3G/4G wireless enterprises, consumer Internet access, tactical networks, global/mobile SATCOM network services, U.S. DoD and intelligence community classified networks, and many others.

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ITI is a campus-wide interdisciplinary unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by the College of Engineering, that is fostering excellence in information trust and security. Participating units include, among others, the College of Applied Health Sciences; the College of Business; the College of Engineering; the College of Law; the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the Department of Aerospace Engineering; the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering; the Department of Computer Science; the Coordinated Science Laboratory; the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; the Department of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering; and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.